Photoconductive organic polymers are an interesting class of materials and are used on a large scale industrially in copiers, laser printers and offset printing plates. Discotic liquid-crystal compounds such as hexapentyloxytriphenylenes having charge carrier mobilities of approx. 10.sup.-3 cm.sup.2 /Vs are of special interest as organic photoconductors (Adam et al., Physical Review Letters 70 (1993) 457-460).
Some discotic columnar liquid-crystal compounds are known to be able to form higher-order phases in addition to or instead of a columnar phase. For example, older German patent application P4429597.9 describes discotic columnar liquid-crystal compounds which form a higher-order helical phase in certain temperature ranges. Such liquid-crystal phases have a high charge carrier mobility. However, many of these known organic photoconductors leave much to be desired regarding their chemical stability.